high altitude Archives

Wild Huckleberry Masterpiece

Monday, September 13th, 2010 at 5:52 pm  
Comments (1)
huckleberries rocky mountains 350x203 Wild Huckleberry Masterpiece

Rocky Mountain huckleberries foraged near Fairplay, Colorado

The high country huckleberry season (Vaccinium species) is winding down now, but it was such a success at its peak that I feel obliged to write about it. This is because not only did we find the berries plentiful (and literally in our very own back yard at 11,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies), but also because Gregg used them to make what was quite possibly the best wild edible dish I’ve had yet to date.

Colorado Huckleberries

I ate huckleberries last fall in New Hampshire that looked and tasted very much like blueberries, but the local huckleberries near Fairplay, Colorado are very different. When plentiful in mid-August, our back yard berries were translucent and ruby red, dangling like tiny gems from the lush, green, low-lying plants that carpet the forested areas behind our house. I tentatively identified them as grouse whortleberries (V. scoparium), which I read about in Wild Berries of the West by Betty B. Derig and Margaret C. Fuller. Even as of yesterday there were a few ripe patches out there, although the remaining berries seem to be purpler. (Whether that means the reds eventually turn purple or the purples ripen later I couldn’t tell you. Suffice it to say that the fruits range from red to blue-purple in color.)  Read the rest of this entry

Holy Puffballs, Batman!

Friday, August 13th, 2010 at 10:55 am  
Comments (4)
puffball big 350x284 Holy Puffballs, Batman!

A puffball mushroom the size of my fist. Photo by Gregg Davis.

All this rain is making the mushrooms come out—a connection I never made before since I’m pretty much a beginner with edible fungi. So, when Gregg and I took a long, off trail hike above our house to an isolated beaver pond at 12,000 feet, crossing an above tree-line meadow to get there, I was beyond surprised to find three large puffball mushrooms the size of my fist growing there. 

Puffballs can grow to enormous sizes, so these were not necessarily all that big. According to coloradomushrooms.com, the Western Giant Puffball (Calvatia booniana), which is found in open fields at high elevations, can grow as large as a soccer ball. “Wildman” Steve Brill has a nice picture of a giant puffball at his website if you want to get a sense of their potential. Imagine eating one of those babies!  Read the rest of this entry

Roseroot is Edible, Who Knew?

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 at 8:24 am  
Leave your comment
roseroot flowering 350x262 Roseroot is Edible, Who Knew?

What I believe to be roseroot, or Sedum rosea.

I first noticed roseroot on a high-country hike above Fairplay, Colorado as Gregg and I were scrambling up a rock face, off-trail as usual. The plant is distinctive and attractive—tiny, blood-red flowers atop a fleshy stalk with spirally overlapping (Peterson, 1977) succulent, white-green leaves—and so I photographed it to look up later in Plants of the Rocky Mountains, a flora identification guide we obtained recently from The Printed Page bookshop in Denver.

Plants of the Rocky Mountains by Linda Kershaw, et. al. (1998) is not specific to edible wild plants, but when I found the plant in question in the picture index followed by the entry, lo and behold, I also discovered that our local roseroot is edible. (A quick perusal of the new guide revealed that edibility information is included for many of the plants, to my very pleasant surprise. Come to find out that Linda Kershaw also authored Edible and Medicinal Plants of the Rockies, a guide I have yet to obtain.) What luck!  Read the rest of this entry

Weird Clover Flower Soup

Thursday, August 5th, 2010 at 6:03 pm  
Comments (1)
red clover field 350x277 Weird Clover Flower Soup

A field of red clovers next to the driveway, with small white clovers betwixt.

The come-down from my huge purslane processing of the other day has been harder than I imagined it would be, such that I have been remiss in processing the bag of plantain that Jim gifted me from Denver. I’ve been afraid to look but I fear it is decomposing in the refrigerator. I had some dandelion leaves in the fridge too—the ones that came attached to the roots I dug up for the purslane South Seas salad the other day. However, when I pulled them out yesterday to chop up and add to the salmon salad I was making, they were covered with disconcerting brown dots.

Compound these two unfortunate episodes with my less-than-successful experiences with red clover, and you get a somewhat disillusioned Wild Food Girl.

Here’s what happened with the clovers: We came home from our trip a week ago to find the side of the driveway, which last year was rife with pennycress, carpeted with beautiful red clovers in full bloom. Beneath those, a more subtle crop of small white clovers peeked out from behind the leaves of their larger cousins. Read the rest of this entry

Tiny Cornucopia of Colorado Wild Edibles

Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 8:14 am  
Leave your comment
colorado cornucopia 350x262 Tiny Cornucopia of Colorado Wild Edibles

A cornucopia of Colorado wild edibles. From left to right, mustard, peppergrass, red clover, pennycress, white clover, wild strawberry peeking through, yarrow, and dandelions.

It’s a treat to be home to the quiet of the mountains again. I awoke today to the sweet, silent obscurity of the early morning dark followed by a sunrise of pale yellow behind bulbous, deep purple clouds left over from last night’s rainstorm. It must have rained hard while we were gone because the rains near washed out the driveway again. In exchange, however, they left us a cornucopia of lush wild edibles among all the other beautiful weeds, a warm welcome back to the house and to writing about wild edible plants after my long hiatus.  

Our wild discoveries started yesterday evening with tiny wild strawberries—not hanging from the strawberry plants in our yard (which in two years have yet to fruit), but from plants on the dirt roadside lining a short stroll around the neighborhood that we enjoyed in the dimming light in a misty rain under the shelter of Gregg’s Pop-pop’s red two-person umbrella. We picked 18 strawberries the size of my pinky nail (and I bite my nails) while ruminating on the decimation of the bird feeders during our absence by what we can only imagine is an errant bear in the neighborhood.  Read the rest of this entry

Thistle Snack Sticks

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 at 4:26 pm  
Leave your comment
thistle spiny2 Thistle Snack Sticks

This thistle is too spiny for me to eat. I think this is a Cirsium but am not certain.

Thistles are a great trail snack. If you’re thirsty, just start chewing on one. After you prick yourself in the mouth, it’ll hurt so much you’ll forget all about being thirsty.       

Just kidding, of course. When enjoying thistles as a trail snack, the first thing you need to do is select one that’s not so extraordinarily spiny. The thistle pictured at right, for example, might be a poor choice. Once you have a good one, what you want to do next is to peel the thistle so it’s not spiny anymore. Then, consume.

Kinds of Thistles       

The common name thistle refers to several genera of plants:        

  1. Cirsium: So-called “true thistles” belong to the genus Cirsium. In Best-Tasting Wild Plants of Colorado & the Rocky Mountains, Cattail Bob’s thistle entry pertains to any and all species of Cirsium, which he describes as having “spine-tipped leaves… rosettes the first year; flowering stalks after the first year. Flowers are round, spiny, and red, pink, or white.” In The Foragers Harvest (2006), Samuel Thayer has a detailed section on Cirsium + Carduus nutans, including information on regional variations, of which there are dozens of species in the U.S. and Canada, both native and introduced, and varying in palatability.  Read the rest of this entry

Roadside Cow Parsnip Boiled in Tap Water—Delicious!

Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at 1:56 pm  
Leave your comment
cow parsnip unfurl 350x262 Roadside Cow Parsnip Boiled in Tap Water—Delicious!

Unfurling cow parsnip leaves are a wild, woolly delicacy.

The other day I wrote about fireweed, the wild edible plant that Gregory Tilford chose to honor by adorning the front cover of his book with it.   

Earning a similar distinction on the cover of Kathryn G. and Andrew L. March’s 1979 guide, Common Edible and Medicinal Plants of Colorado with Recipes and Prescriptions, is cow parsnip, a plant that shares its classification in the Umbelliferae family with regular parsnip, carrots, parsley, dill, coriander, fennel, and anise.   

“The fresh young shoots and the first leaves, just as they are unfolding, are a most exotic, wild and woolly, stimulating taste, a bold stroke to mark off the mid-spring and early summer season,” the Marchs write. “The flavor is one of a kind, with at most distant echoes of fresh coriander, strange at first but one comes to crave it.”   

After reading that, I had to have some. Read the rest of this entry

And Then We Gorged Ourselves on Goosefoot

Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 8:32 pm  
Comments (2)
lambs quarters 300x225 And Then We Gorged Ourselves on Goosefoot

Lambs quarters, aka goosefoot, coming up under the rose bush in Steve's back yard.

Goosefoot, aka lamb’s quarters, wild spinach, and pigweed, is said to be one of the most popular among wild edible plants, particularly when it comes to the uninitiate. 

As “Wildman” Steve Brill and Evelyn Dean put it: “If you begin learning wild foods with only a few plants…this widely distributed, easy-to-identify, tasty, nutritious, long-in-season plant should be one of the first on your list.”   

I don’t always tend to do things in the right order, so as it turns out, goosefoot ended up being more like #50 on my list. But boy, what a #50 it was! 

The opportunity to try it for the first time came about last week when Gregg and I visited his brother-in-law in Fort Collins, Colorado for an early birthday celebration. Steve was out back mowing the lawn for a much-hoped-for badminton tournament when we arrived. I quickly surveyed the small, fenced-in enclosure to find, much to my pleasant surprise, hundreds of lamb’s quarter plants in various stages of growth. “I thought they were pretty so I didn’t weed them out,” commented Steve, who is charged with the lawn care. Now that’s a good man!  Read the rest of this entry

Stalking Bluebells through the Wild Food Literature

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 at 3:25 pm  
Leave your comment
bluebell mertensia 229x300 Stalking Bluebells through the Wild Food Literature

A pretty bluebell of the genus Mertensia.

[This is an updated version of an entry posted at etmarciniec.com]

Quite a few people have told me that “bluebells” are edible, and yet, despite my growing collection of books on wild edible plants, I’ve only found one reference to them as a food source.

“The leaves are awesome,” my friend Rachel Sowers, a gardener by trade, told me as we rode up the chairlift near the season’s end at Arapahoe Basin. “If you’re camping in the backcountry you can add the leaves to a salad. They’re super tasty.”

And, a friend of Gregg’s sister “goes gaga for bluebells,” as she put it, but has also, on occasion, eaten enough of the bright bell-shaped flowers to become sick. 

Last summer I tasted a few bluebells at Gregg’s behest because he, too, recalls eating them, although he was unable to remember when or how he came by the knowledge of their edibility.

Read the rest of this entry

 Page 6 of 6  « First  ... « 2  3  4  5  6